The motherboard

The motherboard (motherbord) is a printed circuit board on which all components and connections are placed. The motherboard is also a very important part of our computer. Motherboards are made in different price ranges and sizes and take into account the processors that are on the mark, each with their own socket foot.

When buying a motherboard is often first look at the chipset. The chipset is made up of 2 main chips on the motherboard. De northbridge en de southbridge, Together they control the devices connected to the system board. This One 2 chips can sit as separate chips on the motherboard, but may also be integrated in 1 chip.

The chipset determines the make and type of processor that can be used but

also determines the type of RAM memory that can be used and the speeds thereof. Because of this it seems that the choice of the processor and motherboard already established, this is not the case.

The type of RAM that can be used is available in several sizes and speeds, this also applies to the processor.

1. southbridge

Of southbridge receives and processes information from the

• IDE interface (which the hard disks and CD / DVD drives are connected). Nowadays SATA port for hard drives.
• PCI bus (the PCI devices, such as sound card and network card)
• USB devices (scanners, Digital's room, printers, mice, Keyboards, etc.)
• parallel ports (o.a. old printers)
• serial port (old mice, Keyboards)
• Audio (Some motherboards have 'onboard' sound)

2. northbridge

Of northbridge receives and processes information from the

• AGP interface (the graphics card in the AGP slot on the motherboard). Today PCIe graphics cards
• Memory / RAM
• Processor
• Video (Some motherboards have a built-in graphics card)

The main task of the northbridge for example feeding the processor with data from the memory and the graphics card.

3 motherboard format